Mint and categorizing manufactured spending?

[jeromedawg]

Hey all,

For those of you who use Mint, how do you categorize and reconcile manufactured spending? Let's take a crude example and say I bought $200 worth of ebay gift cards for $180 instant discount (Target redcard). Then I went and bought some form of currency for $205 that I went and sold to a currency trading company for $195. From this I would have gotten some ebay bucks + $10 profit. What should this generally look like in Mint?

[asiljoy]

I'm not quite understanding what you're doing, but every once in awhile Target/iTunes discounts their giftcards and I buy a bunch for gifts/free money. I count that as money spent in the month the cards were purchased and ignore the action when I actually give them away or use them. The money goes against whatever budget they'll  ultimately be used with, whether it's gifts/groceries.

[Vanguards and Lentils]

In my opinion Mint is not really adapted for this kind of thing. I would suggest gnucash (which I switched to after beginning the credit card/checking account game) or some other accounting program if you want to be precise with where your earnings are coming from. If you kept using Mint, I would just mark these all as "Transfers" because I wouldn't want the relatively large transaction amounts to skew how my real spending looked.

[TheAnonOne]

Hey all,

For those of you who use Mint, how do you categorize and reconcile manufactured spending? Let's take a crude example and say I bought $200 worth of ebay gift cards for $180 instant discount (Target redcard). Then I went and bought some form of currency for $205 that I went and sold to a currency trading company for $195. From this I would have gotten some ebay bucks + $10 profit. What should this generally look like in Mint?

Just count the spending as "SPEND"... if I buy 3k worth of amazon gift cards in July and never spend another dime at amazon for the next 5 years because of it. I just leave 3k spending in July. I wouldn't "hide" it for the sake of keeping a level graph...

[TheAnonOne]

In my opinion Mint is not really adapted for this kind of thing. I would suggest gnucash (which I switched to after beginning the credit card/checking account game) or some other accounting program if you want to be precise with where your earnings are coming from. If you kept using Mint, I would just mark these all as "Transfers" because I wouldn't want the relatively large transaction amounts to skew how my real spending looked.

Same thing with personal capital. If I take a bunch of money out of ATMs/Bank in a month and return it the next day, it raises both my income and spending when in reality, nothing really happened.

Let's say my spending and income are normally 10k income and 5k spend. If I take out 20k in cash and put it back in 5 minutes later, personal capital says I spent 25k that month and made 35k.

The totals still balance out, as far as net-worth and the other big measurements but things like yearly spend or yearly income will be off forever. So I cannot use those tools for those metrics. (Unless i manually mark them as W/E hides them... I don't do this, because I don't care enough)

END: It's going to look like you spent your $300. You need to live with it.